Carmack to English Translation Requested

[iluvquake4]

Can someone translate what Carmack is saying to English, please?

"Q1: What is MegaTexturing technology?"

http://www.gamerwithin.com/?view=articl ... 1319&cat=2

:icon16:

[kleeks]

Hmm they're gonna use one big texture instead of lots of little ones

[iluvquake4]

How will that help?

[Dr4ch]

No tiling ?

[iluvquake4]

Advantages, disadvantages?

[o'dium]

No tiling ?

[Jagou]

So when Splash Damage was starting on, really early with Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, they were looking at some of these different ways to render the outdoor scenes with different blends and things like that. And one of my early suggestions to them was that they consider looking at an approach where you just use one monumentally large texture, and that turned out to be 32,000 by 32,000. And I – rather then doing it by the conventional way that you would approach something like this (i.e. – chopping up the geometry into different pieces and mapping different textures on to there and incrementally swapping them for low res versus high res versions),

I got all that and everything above it just fine. This next quote (right where this one leaves off) is where I personally got lost.

Anyone want to elaborate or try and explain ?

just let them treat one uniform geometry mesh and have this effectively unbounded texture side on there, and use a more complicated fragment program to go ahead and pick out exactly what should be on there, just as if the graphics hardware and the system really did support such a huge texture.

Really does sound odd.

[o'dium]

Not really. It means you can have one single huge texture for the terrain meaning that every single pixel is different, instead of tiling. Then, by looks of a fragment program, you can set up different properties for each surface inside that. So sand kicks up smoke, gravel kicks up dirt, tarmack is easier to drive on than gravel etc etc.

[wviperw]

That interview was actually pretty devoid of the usual Carmack-esque talk that you see. He seemed to explain it quite simply, almost as if he was a lead designer explaning it.

[Eraser]

That interview was actually pretty devoid of the usual Carmack-esque talk that you see. He seemed to explain it quite simply, almost as if he was a lead designer explaning it.

lol indeed. I thought it was quite easy to understand.

iluvquake4, try to read one of carmack's older .plan updates, when Doom 3 was still in early development stages. I remember one where he talked about the differences between different render paths from different hardware vendors. My head started spinning reading just that.

[hemostick]

Check the older ones from when q3 wasn't done, too

[dzjepp]

Tim Sweeny from Epic said something to the effect of that mega texturing is a nice concept but it might prove difficult for artists to implement.

[o'dium]

Tim Sweeny from Epic said something to the effect of that mega texturing is a nice concept but it might prove difficult for artists to implement.

Its not difficult. In fact its VERY easy. You can get a sexy looking terrain map with foliage, trees and effects up in a few minutes. Its pretty much all automated for you, you just tell it what you want.

The problem isn't for the person making, its for the person downloading it. Your going to be downloading 500mg custom map files.

In other words, get used to the 12 or less maps that ship with the game, because even though its gonna be quite easy to make the terrain then cut/paste SD's original buildings into a new cooler map, its also going to be a pain in the arse to host them and get people downloading them.

[R. Tetzlaff]

Or custom maps would have to focus on more classic architectural environments instead of terrain ... or will ET:QW be totally geared twoards large-scale terrain combat?

[obsidian]

Carmack not giving much in depth details does not mean Carmack is speaking in leet programmer language. He just doesn't want to reveal too much just yet.

[Eraser]

Tim Sweeny from Epic said something to the effect of that mega texturing is a nice concept but it might prove difficult for artists to implement.

Well he said that it was difficult without the right tools. You needed very specific tools for it. If I understand correctly, id Software have pretty much nailed the megatexture creation tools down as good as it could be.

[urgrund777]

just let them treat one uniform geometry mesh and have this effectively unbounded texture side on there, and use a more complicated fragment program to go ahead and pick out exactly what should be on there, just as if the graphics hardware and the system really did support such a huge texture.

Just thiknig out loud - This could be done in the sense of a textureatlas, this gigantic texture need not be rendered at once, (though created at once to get it seamless). Via another texture its lookup can define the UV regions for the megatexture which are then clamped when rendering that region of the megatexture onto the mesh. This lookup texture need only be 256x256 (which is 65000 "texture pointers" it could represent). I think the latest cards only support 4096*4096.

Plenty of fancy crap you can do in shaders. Textures aren't just visuals... each pixel is a vector of 4 floats that can be used to do whatever you like.

Thats all just speculation though - "there's more than one way to skin a cat" is so true when it comes to vfx tricks.